Review: The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult

From Goodreads.com: "Sage Singer befriends an
old man who's particularly beloved in her community. Josef Weber is
everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. They strike
up a friendship at the bakery where Sage works. One day he asks Sage
for a favor: to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses…and then he confesses
his darkest secret - he deserves to die, because he was a Nazi SS guard.
Complicating the matter? Sage's grandmother is a Holocaust survivor.

What
do you do when evil lives next door? Can someone who's committed a
truly heinous act ever atone for it with subsequent good behavior?
Should you offer forgiveness to someone if you aren't the party who was
wronged? And most of all - if Sage even considers his request - is it
murder, or justice?"

My Two Cents:

I
really love Jodi Picoult's books. It doesn't matter what she is writing
about, she knows how to tell a story so that you are fully and utterly
engaged. This particular story follows Sage, a young woman trying to
recover from her own tragedy, who befriends Josef, who is like the
grandpa of the small New England town where they live. It is comforting
at first but then Josef tells Sage a huge secret that will change the
trajectory of both of their lives.

The story is told from
several perspectives, which I really liked. You get a chance to put
together the pieces of the story. I honestly would love to know what
sort of planning Picoult uses in order to have all of the different
pieces of the story come together in the awesome way that they do. She
gives you enough pieces to keep you moving through the story because you
want to see what happens next.

Being a historical fiction lover,
I especially loved that the arc of the story really focuses on what
happened during World War II. Josef's secret is that he was an SS
officer and he wants to somehow find some sort of comfort or closure or
perhaps both for what he did. He unfairly wants Sage to give him a sense
of that but something that big and that life changing is really out of
her hands.

This book will definitely appeal to those who like
stories about families, historical fiction, mysteries, and who want to
be sucked in to a great story.

2 comments:

I have an odd relationship with Jodi Picoult though - I either fall completely in love with her books or can't get into them at all. This does sound right up my alley though, so I'll give it a go. Thanks for making me aware it actually exists!

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